Pro Blog Design

Minimalism is a big craze at the minute. Think for a moment; how many pure white designs did you see online today?

There are good principles underneath this all of course, and most likely you already know them.

Minimalism = Less clutter = Less distractions = More time focusing on the important stuff.

But do all minimalist designs work with this principle in mind? Do you not feel that in some cases, a designer has just thrown a few divs together and dubbed his theme minimalist?

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The first 10 Tips for Designing Photoblogs talked about how best to design a photoblog. However, it didn’t properly cover how to design and organize the actual images. That’s what we’re going to do now.

8 More Tips for Your Pictures

• Organize your photos. If your images have variety between them, it’s worth taking the time to categorize them clearly. For example, by type (Color or greyscale?) or by subject (People, Places etc). Tags would allow you to use a whole range of classifications.

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Photoblogs have the very best looking content, no doubt about it. Why then can it be so hard to design a photoblog well? Surely the photos alone look good enough?

These 10 tips discuss the theme and design for the blog/gallery, and I’ll be following it up later with a post on how to organize and display the images well.

My 10 Tips for Styling Your Blog

• Use neutral colors. When photographing people, you never know what they will wear so you use a neutral background. The same applies to your design. You need a background color that works with all your photos (e.g. The black background here is perfect against the Northern Light photos of all colors.)

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Your environment rubs off on you.

Want to be a better photographer? Browse Flickr.
Want to write better? Read great authors.
Want to be optimistic? Hang out with optimists.

It’s a simple principle, and it applies to design as well.

Want to have better taste in design? Surround yourself with beautiful things.

There are hundreds of sources of inspiration surrounding us every day, but for a web designer, the most obvious are simply other web sites.

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This week has been pretty hectic, hence the lack of posts. I wasn’t prepared for a blogging emergency. Sorry guys. Thankfully, that’s just about over.

Today, I want to start ask you a question.

What do you think is the most important aspect of a blog’s design?

I’ve written before about what I think makes a good design, and we’ve talked about those aspects. But if you were forced to choose just one thing, what would it be?

I’ll collect together the best answers (And post my own in the comments of course!), and we’ll see what we can come up with.

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It’s the final saga in our quest to decide What Makes Good Blog Design? and today we are coming to one simple truth, good design looks good. That much is obvious, but good looks are for more than just looking at.

You don’t design a blog to print it out and hang it on your wall to be admired and you don’t design it to keep up with the Joneses. Stunning designs are good simply because they get you more readers.

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Image by Felipe SkroskiIf you’re reading this, then I imagine you have an interest in blog design. Together, we invest huge amounts of time into tweaking our blogs, or huge amounts of money into paying others to do so. But how do we know our design is actually worth all that effort?

What is it that makes a good blog design?

The 4 Aspects of Good Design

There are many factors, but we can wrap the main ones under 4 umbrellas. These are what I would consider the main elements of a good blog design to be.

1. Achieve Site Goals – What is your purpose for having the blog? What do you want visitors to do?

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